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The Marian Faith Healing Ministry (MFHM) is a group which practices religious healing with holy water under the leadership of Felicien Nkwera. In this paper (based on an empirical study), I argue that through the analysis of the process of appropriation under the perspective of religious aesthetics a highly differentiated view on individual variations and thus on the dynamics of the healing process and the efficacy of religious healing becomes possible. Nkwera is a suspended Catholic priest who performs exorcism and who claims to have been chosen by the Virgin Mary for this task. He provides strict normative guidelines for everybody who wants to be healed at the MFHM. Though most of his followers reproduced these norms rhetorically, the stories about their own healing experiences showed that they placed their own interpretative emphases in different places and sometimes came to opposing conclusions on matters of worldview and practice. Individual practices and interpretations among the members of the MFHM are dependent on factors such as the bodily experience of healing and praying or the dynamics within family networks. The aesthetics of religion approach thereby provides the framework for analysing media of transmission as well as individual processes of perception, embodiment, healing performance and efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I present the complex understanding of illness and healing in the Catholic Marian Faith Healing Ministry (MFHM) in Tanzania. The efficacy of religious healing should be understood as a social process dependent on the plausibility and attractiveness that the rituals have for the individual patients, as well as for their community. By contrasting an analysis of the publications of the leader of the group, Father Nkwera, with guided interviews among the members, I was able to develop a differentiated picture of the broad range of healing concepts within the group. While Nkwera translates local spirit beliefs into an apocalyptic worldview that associates physical healing with political critique—especially in the case of HIV/AIDS—his followers situate the healing process within a framework of personal salvation. In my study, I contextualise the MFHM within its pluralistic traditional, Muslim, Catholic, Pentecostal and biomedical environment that impact it on local and global levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]